About 6 weeks ago I blogged about the technology behind the amazing Olympics experience I had here in Canada watching CTV, and my American neighbours had watching NBC, as well as the Norwegian and French coverage. Now another case study has been released from that work. This one focuses on the way the broadcasters were able to insert ads (to pay for all that glorious coverage) and build highlights packages. As it says in the case study:

NBC teamed with premier technology vendors, led by Microsoft, to cover 4,485
hours of 2010 Winter Olympics events in HD via Microsoft Internet Information
Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming to a video player based on Microsoft
Silverlight. In addition to pleasing sports fans, the programming offered an
audience of more than 15.8 million unique visitors to the many advertising
partners of NBC. The exceptional capability of IIS Smooth Streaming and
Silverlight technologies gave technology vendors the tools they needed to
deliver midstream ads while providing an engaging experience for Olympics
enthusiasts.

I find it interesting that Canada, with one-tenth the population of the USA, consumed double the hours of video. Not per person mind you, but total. We were lucky enough to have a lot more to choose from. As you can see when you look at the unique visitor counts, it is mostly that we each watched a whole lot of Olympics back in the dark winter months. Definitely worth a read to see how it was done and how it will no doubt continue to be done in the future.